Michael Zogg – Daily Staff Writer

The men’s basketball Big 12 road losing streak ended in much the same fashion as the football teams – in Lincoln, Nebraska.

After 16 straight road losses, the Cyclones snapped the streak in their first try this season with a 56-53 victory.

“Every time we huddled up I told them, ‘Look, we haven’t won a Big 12 road game since before me and [Diante Garrett] were here. It’s time to win one now,” said junior forward Craig Brackins.

The Big 12 road win, the first such win for any of the eight players that played in the game on Saturday, has given the team confidence moving forward.

“Now we have a road win, so we know we can do it,” junior guard Lucca Staiger said. “It’s in our head now.”

The game got off to a good start for the Cyclones, as they ran out to a 12-point lead with 8:22 left in the first half. The Cornhuskers came right back however, climbing back into the game and taking a two point lead into the locker room.

The game stayed close the rest of the way, but Iowa State was able to pull away at the end thanks to a Garrett steal with less than a minute left, and Staiger’s free throw with 16 seconds left to push the lead to three points.

“We found a way to win and last year or the year before we would have lost the game,” Staiger said.

In fact, the Cyclones lost similar contests this season, dropping back-to-back games against Northwestern and Northern Iowa 67-65 and 63-60 respectively in late November and early December.

Although those losses were disappointing for the team, they feel like they have learned from those mistakes.

“We made the right decisions towards the ends of the game and I think that those close games we lost in the beginning of the year helped us with that,” Staiger said.

The improved decision making down the stretch points to a stronger mental toughness than the team had shown early in the season.

“It shows that we are growing as a team and we stuck together,” Brackins said. “We didn’t fight each other, and we didn’t let certain calls get to us at the end. I felt the last 20 seconds was probably the strongest we have been as a team together.”